Lyatiss Comes Out of Stealth, Aims to Make Networks Easy to Manage

In networking circles these days, you hear a lot about “software-defined networks.” The basic idea is that you can set the parameters of your network, and thus make it easier to manage with a bunch of settings in software, where previously the same changes might have required the purchase of a lot of new hardware.

It’s a new phrase that I think is comparable to all those “X-as-a-service” phrases that have emerged in the last few years, where X can be software, platform, infrastructure and so on.

Today, with the launch of a new company called Lyatiss, we have a new iteration: “Application-defined networks.” The basic idea: Different applications have different needs on the network. Their demands on the network will rise and fall throughout the day, or year, or under all sorts of other elastic conditions. Now that networks are as virtual as the cloud systems they’re connected to, there’s no reason that their demands for bandwidth and capacity have to remain static.

I talked with founder and CEO Pascale Vicat-Blanc, and she explained that a lot of network resources get wasted because the way they’re provisioned is really inflexible. Lyatiss’s product, CloudWeaver, takes a lot of network management functions and automates them. I also saw a demo of CloudWeaver, and it’s about what you’d expect: A very graphic dashboard that makes it easy to build, manage and administer a virtual network.

A key point that helped it make sense to me: Part of what CloudWeaver does is track the patterns of an application’s demands on the network. In the same way that a traffic service might use historical patterns to know how many cars there are likely to be on a given road at certain times of the day, applications have similar patterns. Take those patterns into consideration, and you can automatically adjust how much of a network’s resources need to be redirected to that application at key times of the day.

Right now, it works primarily with applications running on Amazon Web Services, and will in time support apps running on other public clouds, and later in mixed public and private cloud environments.

Update: I fixed Lyatiss’ name in the headline, which I had misspelled. Yeah, typos in headlines are the worst.

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